‘Forza del destino’ a treat
George Jahn

VIENNA(Austria)—Giuseppe Verdi was worried about “all those dead bodies” in his “La forza del destino.” On Saturday, there weren’t enough for some in the audience. “Verdi’s assassins,” yelled someone in the audience after a particularly jarring scene.
He and others booing the performance were clearly calling for the head of producer David Pountney and others responsible for the new production of “La forza” for savaging the Italian maestro with their all-too-free interpretation of his opera classic. True, some of the settings in this Vienna State Opera production were more “Stagecoach” than opera. Lightly clad cowgirls hefting six-guns were stand-ins for the camp followers of the soldiers in the Verdi opera.
Tableaux of military life were turned into grisly portraits of Hell with a touch of Bosch, mixed with T.S. Eliot. And Pountney’s skeptical view of religion made the final moments of the hero’s reconciliation with God, heaven and the death of his beloved Leonora a hard sell. Adding to difficulties is that even without Pountney, this opera calls for an indulgent audience ready to accept a plot almost as cliche as the notion of “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”
Don Alvaro, the hero, is caught in the bedroom of Leonora by her father. As he drops his pistol in submission it goes off, killing the elderly nobleman and setting into notion the “power of destiny” that ultimately leads to two more deaths; that of Leonora’s brother by the hero and of Leonora herself, killed by her brother literally as he expires from the sword wound inflicted by Alvaro.
Originally the hero himself was to commit suicide. Perhaps fearful of the prospect of nobody left to take a curtain call, Verdi himself wrote co-librettist Maria Piave: “We need to think about the ending and find some way to avoid all those dead bodies.”